Transformations in Non-fiction Filmmaking: The SCAD Savannah Film Festival presents the 8th Annual Docs to Watch Roundtable

This year’s SCAD Savannah Film Festival – the “largest university-run film festival in the world,” which ran from October 23-30 – was a conveniently hybrid event that also marked my own return to the in-person festival circuit. Admittedly, as someone residing in a blue state with a strict mask mandate in place, traveling to the Deep South was a somewhat disorienting experience. And a stark reminder that the U.S.’s politicization of a global pandemic really is a war within – and specifically within the states themselves. On the one hand, Georgia’s Republican Governor Kemp issued an executive order back in August that banned local jurisdictions from imposing mask mandates. On the other hand, the liberal college city of Savannah has a mandatory mask mandate. Which, like elsewhere in our exasperatingly dysfunctional country, seemed to result in a disturbing hodgepodge of mask-less red tourists mixing it up both indoors and out with the masked up blue locals. Fortunately, this southern fest doesn’t play when it comes to health protocols (as at the Savannah College of Art and Design itself, proof of vaccination and masks were both required and strictly enforced), giving the 24th edition the air of an all-inclusive Covid bubble. And this sentiment was made all the more palpable at the 8th annual – first return-to-in-person – Docs to Watch Roundtable on October 24. Taking place once again at the Lucas Theatre for the Arts (and also virtually for pass-holders), the annual Docs to Watch roundtable, hosted as always by The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg, featured a who’s who of likely upcoming Oscar nominees. Taking the stage one by one, there was Evgeny Afineevsky (Francesco), Julie Cohen (Julia), Liz Garbus (Becoming Cousteau), Robert Greene (Procession), Todd Haynes (The Velvet Underground), Matthew Heineman (The First Wave), Amanda Lipitz (Found), Jonas Poher Rasmussen (Flee), Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson (Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)), and E. Chai Vasarhelyi (The Rescue).

To read all about it visit Filmmaker magazine.